Sin

Sin is a strange and remarkable thing. It’s innocuous and horrible at the same time. It slips in without the sinner noticing it’s there. It jumps in and consumes a sinner in one fell swoop. It’s barely there and it’s all consuming at the same time.

As I write this I am holding a sleeping baby. This small little person has only been on this earth a handfull of months. In that time the baby has done no wrong, not in human eyes anyway. All actions have stemmed from need, the need to eat, the need for love, the need for companionship and care. What may appear to be selfishness in the first six or so months of life is more often than not the child’s attempt to adjust to life outside the womb and to have all its needs met.

And yet...somewhere deep within that child, deep in the heart, there is sin. It sits there, lurking, hidden from view, waiting to make its presence known. Like an intruder hiding in a closet, sin hides in the heart. It will one day make an appearance but infancy isn’t when it shows, at least not really. Yes, this sleeping child fights having a diaper changed and getting its nose cleaned. It sometimes cries at being restrained or left by a parent. It whines when it can’t reach something or doesn’t feel good. Squirms and complains in a baby kind of way when sleep doesn’t come easily or deeply. But is that really sin?

I can only answer that from my human mindset and in my humanness, I would have to say those things are more about having needs that must be met by another than it is about sin. The Lord built wonderful things into babies to see to it that they tug at the heartstrings and that cause older kids and adults to want to help them.

Big eyes and small baby sounds draw the attention and pull the nurturing out of almost all people that encounter a baby. Cries are pitched so that they bring out a ‘I must fix whatever is wrong, NOW’ reaction. Particularly in women. These are things the Lord placed into babies to draw out a certain reaction from those in a position to care for and nurture them.

I saw an article a year or so ago about cows that found a baby...something, I forget what the animal was...stuck in the mud. The cows stood in a circle around the baby, protecting it the best they could until people came and rescued it. The article spoke of how babies are made to draw out that nurturing instinct, especially in females, even in the animal kingdom.

So my human heart and mind cannot see the things young babies do as being sin although my Scriptural understanding is that those babies are created with sin in their hearts. It lives within even the most innocent of people, lying dormant until whatever time it comes to the surface and shows in the actions of that person.

Even the elect are not immune to sin. We all do it. Scripture talks of it often and in great detail. We are told how it comes to be in people, who the author of it is, the punishment for it, and more. Knowing all of that, having it spelled out before us, we still find ourselves mired in it. Even those born again, regenerated, elect people of God commit it every single day.

And we encounter it in others, strangers and loved ones alike, as we go about our lives. There isn’t a day that goes by, a breath we take, a moment we live, that we are not surrounded by and mired in sin.

To live…

Is to sin.

Scripture tells us that we must all live out the lives assigned to us. For many years I had no idea of that bit of wisdom passed down from the Lord. Hidden within what appears to be a very long book, placed in the midst of much instruction and teaching, lies a tiny granule of a huge treasure. It’s located in 1 Corinthians 7:17 and says…

Only let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him, and to which God has called him. This is my rule in all the churches.

I can think of that verse and remember it day in and day out but let me get faced with people committing certain sins and those sins push just the right button to create an immediate and human reaction in me. There are just some things in this life that I handle a lot better than others and certain human traits push every button I have. And try though I might I cannot seem to not find myself bothered by those traits. And in my humanness I tend to forget that each person was set in the life they have.

And yet...people everywhere sin. I have found myself thinking a great deal on sin lately. It just kind of keeps coming back to me. When I started writing this I had encountered a couple of things in my personal life where sin was involved. I thought of sin then. I thought of how different people are overpowered by certain sins, much the way some people have interests in one thing or another. I like dolls. My husband likes golf. I have relatives that love exercise, video games, movies, concerts, and more. Each person is drawn to what interests them.

It seems to me that we are just as drawn to certain sins. Adultery is not my sin. I cringe at the very thought. It was never my sin. Even in my young teens I remember being appalled by adultery. But I was drawn into romance books which is, in many ways, a love affair of the heart. I gave up romance novels when I married but I read more than my share of them before then. Were those books sin? Some of them were. Some of them had explicit adult only situations that must be some kind of written pornography.

Those books were far from my only sins but I was drawn to them from a young age through no intent of my own. It just happened.

And so I was slowly working my way through writing this post, setting it aside often to tend to family and other obligations, when America experienced yet another atrocious school shooting. I'm sure I'm not the only one that was shocked and horrified, terrified and angry, sad and worried...the list goes on and on, and on. My husband was away from home and text me that there had been another shooting. Until I got that text I was blissfully unaware. In my curiosity I flipped the news on and watched a few short minutes, just long enough to find out the location and that the shooter had not been caught. I turned the TV off again. I didn't want to see it, didn't want to hear it. I couldn't stand to see it played out before my eyes.

And I must admit I did something else too.

I thanked the Lord that none of my family were there. I thought 'but for the grace of God that could be us in that situation'. It was a selfish thought. A selfish reaction. But it was so very heartfelt.

In the moments that passed after that, moments that added up to I don't know how much time, I flipped the news on from time to time. I did not want to see the scenes, did not want to hear the commentary. I just wanted to know if the kids in that school were safe yet and what the death toll was.

That shooting still lingers in my mind and heart. I think of the kids I know that are of the age that they could have been in that school. I think of the days when I was a substitute teacher and how we never had to face those things. It never crossed my mind to even think about such a think happening back then.

And then I thought of the sin that culminated in that horrific act. At first I thought that might be the most horrific outward manifestation of sin...a shooting at a school...but then I knew that to me there was a worse one. Abortion has to top a school shooting, for me anyway. Abortion is the slaughtering of the most innocent of all people. It's the murder of people that can do nothing to protect themselves. And to make it all the worse it is the mother that does it. Oh, she may not wield the knife or inject herself with poisons but she does it just the same.

What kind of sin must it take for a woman to kill her own child?

But is that most horrific example of sin, that total evilness, any worse than any other? Scripture says that if we commit one sin, we commit them all. So if we tell a lie...we have murdered. I will admit that I don't fully understand it all. My human mind cannot fathom the depths to which sin goes. I struggle and stumble through my own thoughts on sin right now. I question and seek.

I saw a question on a reformed site just this morning. Someone had read something by Charles Spurgeon and said they were struggling with it and did not understand. Someone else responded that that was a good thing because in their struggle to understand they would dig deeper, go further, learn more.

Sin is simple.

It is the disobedience of God.

So simple. So easy. So complex. So hard. My human mind relegates sin to evilness. I think of sins like murder, adultery, child abuse, theft... But, it's not that simple. It's all those things and more. All those things and none of them.

It is, simply put, to disobey God. And yet it consumes people until it literally controls them. I saw something the other day, and I can't remember now where I saw it, that said the government wants to put chips in all people's heads to control their every action and thought. I don't know what that was about, I saw it for only moment and paid it almost no attention but I think of it now. If a person had some sort of all controlling chip implanted in them it would override everything else in them until that person was at the mercy of whatever was controlling that chip. Sin is much that way. It is a tiny little thing, deep inside us, and it controls everything. Living and breathing within the human heart like some sort of vicious monster.

At least it does unless we are saved from it.

Only that vicious monster is like a tiny speck. So little, so small. Just the disobedience of God. It's in that small single little thing that it becomes so very huge and evil.

It's easy for everyone to see why murder and stealing is wrong, easy to understand why lying and adultery are wrong...or is it? There are some that see nothing wrong with lying, there was a time that I saw nothing wrong with it. I have a relative that often tells me that I should say or do something that would be a lie and I have to tell this person I do not lie. I have even had this person tell someone else that I would say something even though saying it would be a lie and I had to correct them before this other person. For some reason this relative does not seem to get it that I'm not going to lie, not even a little.

But most people can see the evilness in acts like murder. Some can see it in things like stealing and lying. And many more see nothing wrong with it. Even if they do at first see the problem areas it's a slippery slope because they may think it's wrong to commit adultery but they may see nothing wrong with being attracted to some Hollywood star or musician. They may find nothing wrong with looking at someone with inappropriate thoughts while out in public.

Growing up I was in and out of 'church' buildings. I heard all sorts of rights and wrongs within those so-called holy walls. I was taught to have reverence in the 'church', taught it was God's house. One of the things I was taught in 'church' was that a sin is a sin is a sin. In other words no one sin is greater than any other, yet Scripture tells us that the greatest of commandments is that we love God with all our heart, mind and soul.

So, Scripturally the greatest sin would be to not love God above all else. That's a sin even the elect commit every day. We simply do not have it within our beings to love God all day long, every single day, every second, above all else. It can't be done. But we are told to do it.

What kind of love is required of us? Are we to love God with the kind of love we feel for our spouse and children? An earthly emotional love? Or is it something else?

That's a very good question and a possible topic for another day but for today I have no answer. And for today all I can say is that to sin by not loving God with all of our being for every second of our entire life is a sin that has no outward manifestations. Yes, there will be far reaching consequences for not doing so, even the elect will feel and see them, but there is no easy to see 'he lied' kind of proof.

It is a sin of the heart. A sin that hides so very deep within the soul that only the Lord can truly see it. Even we do not have the ability to fully know to what depths we commit this sin.

And that brings up a whole different side of sin- the soul deep side.

Scripture says, Christ says, that people will call him 'Lord, Lord' and He will say, "depart from me, I never knew you, you workers of inequity'.

Who are these people that will cry out 'Lord, Lord' only to be turned away? Cast aside when the last hope is gone? Christ says they will say, 'didn't we do these things in your name', and yet He will cast them aside anyway.

WHO are they?

They have to be believers. At least to some degree. They will call him "Lord, Lord" and tell Him they did things in His name. So outwardly they must be some kind of believer. Inwardly too. It seems like maybe they will be shocked when Christ turns them away. For that to happen they had to believe themselves to be saved. They had to think they were given salvation. They had to BELIEVE, probably to the depths of their souls that they were regenerate, born again Christians. And Christ will tell them to 'get away from me you workers of inequity'. Oh, the horror that day will bring for anyone that finds themselves in that situation. But Scripture says it will happen.

And why?

What separates us from Christ?

Sin. Sin is the separation between us and our holy God. And it's sin, sin rooted soul deep within us, that divides us from Christ. That then is what will divide the people that cry out 'Lord, Lord'. And yet these people BELIEVE. Their sin in that day of reckoning will be just as great as the murderer.

So sin is obvious-we see it in people like murderers, people that lie, cheat, steal. We hear it in profane words and all sorts of media. But it's also so quiet, so unassuming, so decietful that it hides so far within the souls of people that they can hold a belief in Christ, seeming almost to cling to Him, maybe even die for Him, only to be told, 'I never knew you'.

We are told to make our calling sure, to make our election sure, but how many religious people have tested themselves and believe themselves to be in the faith?

Sin is a horribly, remarkable, horrid thing. It's easy to see in most people but it's no less deadly when it hides so deep within the heart that the very person does not know it's there. It can be so deceitful as to hide under a guise of Christianity.

Life is but a frayed rope dangling us between heaven and hell. One last break of the cords takes the illusion away and sends us plummeting or soaring. We all deserve hell, are all sinners in need of punishment. Only those given grace are saved from the horrors of hell.

And sin...

Sin is an all consuming fire devouring everyone in it's path, everyone that ever lived. Only the elect are saved from it's grip when God's mighty hand snatches them away.

And as huge as that fire is...

It's summed up in the tiny little explanation that sin is quite simply the disobedience of God.